FROM A RECENT TWITTER DATASTREAM:
@jonCates
#glitch: the: misapprehended: unmade; destabilized; anomic; misnumbered; unrendered; misinterpreted; incorrect; leaking; flooded; collapsed;
16 Jan
@jonCates
#glitch: the: corrected; disharmonic; chopped; screwed; sick; deconstructed; unexpected; surprising; unplanned; unaccounted-for; unknown;
16 Jan
@jonCates
#glitch: the: "celebrated"; crunched; rusted; disfluent; poetic; natural; aged; obsolete; inaccurate; noisy; discordant, canceled; fixed;
16 Jan
@jonCates
#glitch: the: bitcrushed; disordered; literal/phonological paraphasic, neologistic paraphasic and verbal paraphasic; defective;
16 Jan
@jonCates
#glitch: the: mispoken; impaired; limited; gated; crackled; distorted; hot; incapacitated; traumatized; buffered; degraded; degenerated;
16 Jan
@jonCates
#glitch: the: broken; incomplete; failed; forgotten; mistaken; partial; abbreviated; compressed; recompressed; misaligned; misencoded;
// Evan intros me on panel
i come here from Chicago
warez in the early 2000's aka 2002 + 2003, i began thinking critically about the Dirty Style proposed by the then Chicago-based BEIGE collective, a now well known crew whois represented in part here in this exhibition by Paul B Davis + elsewarez by other former members.
// Robert Johnson
// "Chicago is home to…" S03
// r4WB1t5 doc
// "connectivities…" S04
// Hackmeeting doc
collectives + collaborations come + go for various reasons. in 2005 i started saying 'Dirty New Media' in the context of an open platform or framework of festivals i organized in Chicago + Mexico City w/various collaborations + co-conspirators including but certainly not limited to Jon Satrom, Amanda Gutierrez + Jake Elliott. my interest then + now was on a dirtiness that could embrace glitches w/ + w/in grammars of pornography, New Media, Web Art, Realtime Audio Video, Noise Musics, Free Cultures, Open Source, Piratical Practices, etc…
3 years later in 2008, i started referring to myself + my work as digitalPunk, a obvious reference mayhaps even in reverence to faded lipstixxx tracings of speculative histories including the fetish/bondage scene of the 1974 SEX shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood on King's Road in London from which emerged the Sex Pistols, 80's Gibsonian Cyberpunk, Stephensonian Steampunk as suggestively rendered in The Diamond Age + most recently the Crystalpunk aestheticonceptechnics of crashing xxxxx AP, the former collaboration of Martin Howse + Jonathan Kemp.
// Gibsonian_importBW.mov
so these enumerations are just to say a bit of background specific to glitches + glitching + the current context + taxonomies of artistic theorypractices…
// sampling.mov
the field of Noise Music a definition exists and is mobilized by Noise musicians to identify "Harsh Noise" from other forms of Noise Music. The harshness of Harsh Noise musics relates to the music itself (i.e via volumes, amplitudes, frequency ranges, rhythms, shifts in tempo, pacing, etc) as well as the experience of listening to the music. Harsh Noise is harsh. Glitch Art is glitched. But is it harsh? Or, is it necessarily always harsh, hard-edged or crunchy? Such were the questions posed by New Media artist and Media Art Histories scholar Paul Hertz to Rosa Menkman recently in Chicago during the GLI.TC/H festival of Noise & New Media.
Menkman's response (as we walked along Wabash Avenue beside and underneath train tracks that recall the trains that travel in her "The Collapse of PAL" performance/video) was "no, not necessarily..." and i would add that Glitch Art is often also cyberpsychedelic for instance in the work of Morgan Higby-Flowers
// Timonds
I use the term cyberpsychedelic to refer to the combinatory effects of mixing Cybernetics and Psychedelics as cultural influences, technologies and aesthetic principles from the 1960's to the present.
…these flows follow movements over time, across moments + through media from celluloid to CRTs to phosphor burn-ins to LCD cracks to file formats, not in linear in histories but rather distributed across multitudes, unrecognized immediately as they occur but rather gathered together only from the perspectives of Last Angels of Histories.
This flow forward in reverse results in the Glitch or as 'the spirit of that time of what the glitch was' or had occurred. At that moment in time and of time-based media... of traces of tracings of what has past... we are left with all that has been left (behind) and embedded by digital and analog systems, all of which include and express themselves over and over again, in times, as specific as formats failing or found to be debris, broken bits of histories awash and washing up against the shores of what we thought we knew, against the grains of our expectations + assumptions in technological times
i am engaged in building brittle systems with breaking points that can be mobilized during performances to be literally, metphorically +/or theatrically broken on stage, as forms of computer majik + crafting spellwarez that can be cast +/or invoked as executable + cut-up-able applications of computer witchcraft
The computer is a syncretic device/environment and context. computational space is social, networked and we interface with these forms socially. this is the meaning of the term: technosocial. The term technosocial arises from the field of Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) in discussions of the social construction of technology as related to the histories and sociologies of the Sciences.
i use the phrase "computer witchcraft" to refer to the way in which "majik" or "magic" can be understood or discussed as a technology or set of technologies. in other words, various magical traditions (ceremonial majick, pre-christian or wiccan practices, alchemy, stage magic, chaos majik, sex majik, etc…) can all be thought of as technologies. in the case of alchemy, the alchemical tradition is in many ways a direct precursor to contemporary science in general + New Media Art in specific. scholars of Media Art Histories such as Florian Cramer have also compared computer programming to spellcasting. + as Erik Davis wrote in TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, gnosticism and magic are deeply rooted metaphors for how we think about + understand our contemporary digital technologies.
being a computer witch is also to take a position that questions the exclusively masculine-gendered metaphor of 'computer wizards'. The concept of the Computer Wizard, a traditionally white male position of technosocial power, is defined in The Jargon File (a collaborative resource of hacker terminology now maintained by Eric S. Raymond) as an individual expert hacker. Coven Programming approaches to Computer Witchcraft counter individualism in favor of collaborations and questions expert cultures as well as critiquing patriarchy.
// blueschicago.mov
The technological is a site for negotiating fears, hopes, desires b/c the technological is also an expression/form of material power, a materialization of possible power structures (either those that are pre-existing, subversive, ascendent, etc...)
the recent future is often a form of critique of nearby pasts + the currency of elusive present moments.
“Remixology is the science of continuation and the art of drastic remaking, total remaking, remodelling.” - More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction - Kodwo Eshun (1999)
Rosa Menkman has publicly stated her first experiences with glitch and Glitch Art as being inspired and informed by JODI, the Dutch experimental New Media Art collective who have inspired so many of us as well. Menkman first encountered JODI's work through their deconstructions of Quake, a project called Untitled Game, which has become an almost iconic work of Glitch and New Media Art.
// JODI video from GLI.TC/H?
Menkman offers us criticality through creative practice by tracing the effects of our technologies as the break, bend and disappear into forced obsolescent deaths. She cracks open and apart our expectations, reminding us that we humans also have technologies that we have written and that now write us. Our technologies (broken, failed, reconstructed, fragmentary, lost&&found) survive us as memories, remembering us through their recordings + cultural existences as machines that are haunted by us as much as we are haunted by them.
//
recently, in Chicago, i was involved as an artist/speaker/DJ in GLI.TC/H, a Noise & New Media event/conference/symposium/festival/gathering + prior to that i organized a Critical Glitch Artware event @ a hacker conference in Cleveland w/Jake Elliott. organizers of GLI.TC/H were invited participants in the Critical Glitch Artware + vice versa. so i have over the last year bin thinking + feeling together w/others about what constitutes + contributes to our understandings of "Glitch" as an aestheticonceptechnic
as Shane has written for this exhibition: "Technology cannot be neutral." +/or as i have said previously: i am not sympathetic to the claim that technologies are neutral.
//
// closure: 00:02:36